@User has left the channel

What are people using with ngspice these days? The built-in display is a bit "meh" but I haven't found many alternatives that are reasonable (especially with a large number of signals to navigate).

@User have you tried gaw?

Hrm, I go to File-Open and it freezes for like 30 seconds

@User: There was some discussion early on about using gtkwave. There is a branch of ngspice that generates lxt2 format that can be read into gtkwave, and there's something called "dualwave" which is a dual-window gtkwave that displays digital traces from a vcd file simultaneously with analog signals from an lxt2 file, properly time-aligned.

My gripe with the lxt2 function for ngspice is that it doesn't come with a way to turn it off (that is, it always produces a .lxt file whether you want one or not). Risto Bell added that feature (turning it off) in the version we have at efabless, but it would be preferable if that was folded into the regular ngspice distribution.

@User yeah I had played with that too but was also looking for a way to make it an option and just haven't had the time. gtkwave is perfect if we can save in that format.

Holger of ngspice accepts patches and is quite active

I realized that the one thing gaw lacks is an ability to "filter" signals. If you have hundreds or thousands of signals, it is a pain to search and find the right one.

I submitted an issue so maybe this can get added.

That is very true. Its kind of an orphaned project though unfortunately. @User is doing essential maintenance but I don't think has any plans for feature improvement

I went ahead and added a primitive filter option (just filters list based on a substring) and submitted a pull request

@User Works great, merged in. Thanks!! When there are many saved variables the signal list is almost unuseable. The filterbox is a great improvement. What i do is to send waveforms to gaw by highlighting the nets (or voltage sources for currents) in xschem, however for many other situations (transistor parameters, transconductances, device parameters) (or when not using xschem 🙂 ) you really need to dig into the signal list.

@User We can easily extend this to do a regex. I'll add that soon

I noticed you can't clear the filter so that's a bug

General regex added in a pull request. Gotta love open source. Don't have a feature you want? Add it.

Now to use it to debug my design..

Will merge. Thanks!!!

It's not fast on my big example (takes a couple seconds to filter and refresh) but I have a huge memory with a lot of signals.

Thanks for getting it going. I've been annoyed at not having a decent viewer

Yes i know, for a good viewer there is a long way to go, but improving what we have now is really a good thing!.

Another thing i do if the design is backed by a schematic is to put markers on nodes i want to be saved in the output file . Xschem resolves the hierarchic node names and writes the .save instructions. This speeds things up. The only problem is murphy law. The node failing is always the one you did not mark for saving 😄

Yeah, I'm not using a schematic since I do automated characterization of my spice netlists. So I'm not using that integration. Though, I will when I teach my intro VLSI class again

They always complained about xcircuit + ngspice w/ xplot

Another feature it really needs is the ability to click and pan the windows

xschem can now be configured to use Analog Flavor's bespice wave viewer. Just click 'Simulation-> Configure simulators and tools' and set the 'spicewave' tool to be 'bespice wave'. Set the correct path for the program according to your installation. Bespice can be downloaded from analog flavor's web site. The evaluation license loads ngspice files, does not load many other formats and does not have postprocessing abilities. However it is perfectly useable with xschem, no size limits. It has the ability to stack many signals vertically, this is useful for digital /mixed circuits. Bespice has the ability to accept tcp commands, so in the near future i will enable cross probing nets to bespice as i have done with gaw. The signal browser is hierarchical, so searching for nets in big designs is way more convenient. @User as with gaw bespice also does not have the ability to save list of shown waves to a file, however i have contacted the developers asking to implement this function, as it is really useful and asked by so many designers. They responded it's on their to-do list, i hope they will increase the priority for this...

I am working on online Waveform Viewer https://github.com/wavedrom/vcdrom

a few examples can be found here: https://github.com/wavedrom/vcd-samples

@Yusuke Sakemi has left the channel